The empirical literature on the impact of unions on wages has stressed two major conclusions. Firstly, unionised workers earn a wage premium when compared to comparable nonunionised workers. Secondly, the dispersion of wages within the union sector is lower than in the nonunion sector. We examine the validity of these findings in the context of a developing country labour market. Our results show that unionism does create a positive wage differential for male, semi-skilled workers with formal labour contracts in Brazilian manufacturing, and that, contrary to the common finding in the existing literature, wage dispersion is greater in the union sector. We show that these findings can be explained by the greater variance in the characteristics of unionised workers, the vulnerability of nonunionised workers to market conditions, and the structure of wage bargaining.
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Paper provided by Department of Economics, University of Kent in its series Studies in Economics with number
9805.
Length: Date of creation: Jan 1998 Date of revision: Publication status: Published in Research in Labor Economics, 1999, pp.??-?? Handle: RePEc:ukc:ukcedp:9805
Contact details of provider: Postal: Department of Economics, University of Kent at Canterbury, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NP Phone: +44 (0)1227 764000 Fax: +44 (0)1227 827850 Web page: http://www.ukc.ac.uk/economics/
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Find related papers by JEL classification: J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials J51 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor-Management Relations, Trade Unions, and Collective Bargaining - - - Trade Unions: Objectives, Structure, and Effects
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